At a press conference on Sunday afternoon, Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff Clarence Dupnik offered more details on how suspected Arizona shooter Jared Loughner was disarmed.

Dupnik said that when Loughner ran out of bullets in his first magazine clip, a woman who had already been shot "went up and grabbed" the new magazine "and tore it away from him." Dupnik said the name of the woman was known but he did not share it during the press conference.

After the confrontation with the woman, Loughner was able to load another magazine into his weapon, but "the spring in the magazine failed," Dupnik said, and two men were able to get his weapon away from him and subdue him until law enforcement arrived.

Dupnik said the work of these three people potentially averted a "huge greater catastrophe."

Is this your first encounter with the Phelps clan? They are, indeed, despicable._________________Scire aliquid laus est, pudor est non discere velle
"It is laudable to know something, it is disgraceful to not want to learn"
~Seneca

You know, normally I go to The Daily What for their interesting links and topical humour, but it seems like, in America, comedy site collate news like crazy. They've been pretty much keeping an eye on this story as it's been progressing._________________Colours? What colours?

- TUCSON, Ariz. – Recovering from a gunshot wound to the head depends on the bullet's path, and while doctors are optimistic about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' odds, it can take weeks to months to tell the damage.
Doctors say the bullet traveled the length of the left side of the Arizona congresswoman's brain, entering the back of the skull and exiting the front.
Fortunately, it stayed on one side of her brain, not hitting the so-called "eloquent areas" in the brain's center where such wounds almost always prove fatal.
Importantly, Giffords was responding nonverbally Sunday to simple commands in the emergency room — things like "squeeze my hand."
That implies "a very high level of functioning in the brain," said Dr. Michael Lemole of Tucson's University Medical Center, Giffords' neurosurgeon.
Now, her biggest threat is brain swelling. Surgeons removed half of her skull to give the tissues room to expand without additional bruising, Lemole said.
That bone is being preserved and can be reimplanted once the swelling abates, a technique the military uses with war injuries, added his colleague and trauma surgeon Dr. Peter Rhee.
Adding to Giffords' good prospects is that paramedics got her to the operating room in 38 minutes, her doctors said. Now she is being kept in a medically induced coma, deep sedation that rests her brain. It requires a ventilator, meaning she cannot speak. Doctors periodically lift her sedation to do tests and said she continues to respond well to commands.

Shortly after November's electoral defeat for the Democrats, pollster Mark Penn appeared on Chris Matthews's TV show and remarked that what President Obama needed to reconnect with the American people was another Oklahoma City bombing. To judge from the reaction to Saturday's tragic shootings in Arizona, many on the left (and in the press) agree, and for a while hoped that Jared Lee Loughner's killing spree might fill the bill.

You are a god-damned prick, Glenn Reynolds. No one hoped that a climate of anger and fear would lead to the assassination of a public official. In fact, many people (in fact, Ms. Giffords herself was among them) have been warning that irresponsible rhetoric had whipped many people into a clearly dangerous frenzy. If you constantly proclaim the government to be illegitimate, you do not get to be surprised or to claim innocence when a nut takes your message to heart.

Quote:

Mrs. Palin has used some martial metaphors—"lock and load"—and talked about "targeting" opponents. But as media writer Howard Kurtz noted in The Daily Beast, such metaphors are common in politics. Palin critic Markos Moulitsas, on his Daily Kos blog, had even included Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's district on a list of congressional districts "bullseyed" for primary challenges. When Democrats use language like this—or even harsher language like Mr. Obama's famous remark, in Philadelphia during the 2008 campaign, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun"—it's just evidence of high spirits, apparently. But if Republicans do it, it somehow creates a climate of hate.

You know who else is a god-damned prick? Anyone who believe that Democrats and republicans have been equally divisive in their rhetoric and actions. Daily Kos had the district bullseyed. Sarah Palin placed crosshairs on the district and encouraged people to reload. If you really think those are equal, you are delusional.

Quote:

To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

There are no words for this level of stupidity._________________Scire aliquid laus est, pudor est non discere velle
"It is laudable to know something, it is disgraceful to not want to learn"
~Seneca

The Tucson Shooter and Arizona PoliticsIf the political climate played a role—a big if—no one should pretend left and right were equally responsible.John B. Judis January 9, 2011 | 8:43 pm

Quote:

Perhaps the stupidest and least surprising comment about the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson came from New York Times columnist Matt Bai. Bai, the author of an interesting book about Democratic politics, analyzed the political environment—the universe of discourse that framed the alleged attempt at assassination by Arizonan Jared Lee Loughner. Here is what he wrote:

Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin’s infamous “cross hairs” map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords’s, with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman’s apparently liberal constituents declared her “dead to me” after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.
The implication is that Giffords’s assassination arose in the context of both right-wing and left-wing attacks on her, and that the onus of changing the political rhetoric of violence falls equally on the right and the left.

Now, it may turn out that Loughner was inspired by some nutty far-left blog that advocated killing Democratic Blue Dogs, of which Giffords was one. But if you look broadly at today’s political discourse, as Bai purports to do, what you find is that gun, warrior, murder, mayhem, and generally Armageddon-like, apocalyptic rhetoric is virtually monopolized by right-wing organizations, talk-show hosts, and politicians. That is not saying that the right always monopolizes the rhetoric of violence. Certainly it has in the South, but in different eras, the left rather than the right has had the franchise in the far west and the north. Think, for instance, of the late ‘60s. But in the last two years, there is no contest.

Bai’s examples are ridiculous. Palin’s crosshairs, aimed at Giffords’s district, certainly conjure up a rifle or bomb sight. But the metaphor on Daily Kos—that Giffords after a vote is “dead to me”—is straight out of family wills. It is what a parent says to a prodigal child. The metaphor has nothing to do with killing.

Daily Kos had the district bullseyed. Sarah Palin placed crosshairs on the district and encouraged people to reload. If you really think those are equal, you are delusional.

Unless I'm mistaken, Daily Kos - a site on the internet - placed a bullseye on the district, targetting it for possible Democratic gains. Sarah Palin - a former vice presidential nominee and former governor of Alaska - placed a crosshairs on Giffords personally, in an effort to get rid of her.

Slightly different, yeah._________________attitude of a street punk, only cutting selected words out of context to get onself excuse to let one's dirty mouth loose

Joined: 09 Jul 2006Posts: 9718Location: I have to be somewhere? ::runs around frantically::

Posted: Mon Jan 10, 2011 11:48 am Post subject:

Quote:

If the political climate played a role—a big if—no one should pretend left and right were equally responsible.

I agree with this statement.

If the "if" turns into a no, I would still be thrilled if public opinion shamed the media into speaking more reasonably._________________Before God created Las he pondered on all the aspects a woman might have, he considered which ones would look good super-inflated and which ones to leave alone.
After much deliberation he gave her a giant comfort zone. - Michael